Random thoughts. Not fit for general consumption. Parental advisory. Occasional sarcasm and irony ahead. No warranties, explicit or implied. No money-back-guarantee. Does not prevent hairloss, bad foot hygiene or acid reflux.

2010-05-11

End-to-end integration.

Yesterday I achieved end-to-end integration: EMC2 speaking to the CNC machine I've been building. This is the machine running some sample G-code:

There is still a number of things that need to be done:

Calibrate the stepper driver boards. The X-axis stepper motor is still getting quite hot. I've tried to tune it by ear, but I guess I need to hook up the multimeter and figure out how much current I am sending through the motor.

The limit-switches need to be mounted and wired up

I need to find a suitable box to mount the 24V PSU (I've been running on 13.5V so far) and the electronics.

Finish the carrier board for the stepper drivers and parallell port interface.

Configure it for Mach 3

Get a PSU for the spindle and a PWM-controller of some sort.

Getting EMC2 up and running was surprisingly easy. Now, I did have the advantage of knowing a lot of the parameters ahead of time (the advantage of having built everything yourself), but I seriously had not expected that I would have a working setup just 10 minutes after I fired up the configuration wizard.

When I get some time I hope to document in more detail how everything is hooked up.

2 comments:

No, so far I have just generated some trivial G-code to run some tests on the machine via EMC2. Since most of the CAM stuff is Windows-based I haven't had a chance to dive into it since I mainly run OSX and Linux.

I would like to get Mach3 up and running as well. For some reason it didn't work the last time I tried. Then again, I was impatient :-).

The Pololu drivers work nicely. I tried to build a carrier board for them and despite checking all the joints for continuity, when I popped the drivers in the thing didn't work. So I have 3 of them mounted on a breadboard now -- which is good enough for testing.